Meet The Man Who Founded The Pirate Party That Is Spreading Through European Parliaments

The first day of 2006 saw Rick Falkvinge publish a manifesto online for his Pirate Party.

Less than two months later the Swedish-based movement was eligible to run in the country's election. Now, almost six years on, the party has a political foothold in Germany as well as the European Parliament.

With a platform centered on online copyright, transparency, and privacy, the movement has found popularity with young voters looking for alternative options.

But the movement's rise hasn't been without growing pains. Just today Der Spiegel published an article noting how the Pirate Party has been criticized in Germany. Commentators have pointed at the movement's narrow policies while noting that a recent apparent shift to the left aligns the party with other protest movements, allowing the Pirate Party to be dismissed as a protest movement at best and, at worst, a wasted vote.

Enter Falkvinge, the founder and also the former head of the party in Sweden. We caught up with him while he was in New York to inquire why people should care about the Pirate Party.

You’re planning on visiting Occupy Wall Street while you’re in New York, what’s your opinion of the movement? Are there any similarities between the Pirate Party and Occupy Wall Street?

When you look at the process of all major political movements in the past 120 years they all started out as a reaction to an injustice, basically saying, “We don’t know what it is we want, but we don’t want this.” Then they moved on to formulated an alternative and moved on from this fairly narrow alternative to developing an ideology that branched off in to a part of society. This is a process that all major movements have gone through and this is a process that the Pirate Party is currently going through; understanding our ideology, that’s only now coming into words, six years after the founding.

There is a great deal of overlap between the Pirate Parties of the world, Anonymous and Occupy Wall Street but you can only feel it in your gut at this point. A lot of folks are activists in all three of these movements and for a reason. But, what that reason is, we can’t really put our finger on it.

As the Pirate Party’s popularity is growing is there any concern that you’ll be seen merely as a protest party and not a party with the message you’re promoting?

It’s part of the evolution of the new movement. You start being against something, as in you just don’t want this, which is the protest faze of a new movement. Then, gradually you grow in to being a favorable alternative which then, following the cycle of history, wins out over the old guard. So, I think it’s important that we attract people for all kinds of reasons.

Am I worried about being seen as a protest movement? Well, historically, it’s always been the method of the establishment to try to de-legitimize a new political movement. If we’re following in that pattern that’s good because it means we’re on the road to success.

The Finnish Liberal party picked up your policy on copyright. In terms of moving forward is that something you’re interested in? Not necessarily having the Pirate Party gain success but the ideology behind it gaining success and being adopted?

The only way to affect policy is to take votes from politicians in power. Once you start doing that, even if you don’t get into parliament, and that’s an important point, you’re starting to shift policy. In most states of Europe you’ve got two blocks or parties that are very closely tied for power so it comes down to one percent of half of one percent which determines who becomes the next prime minister or president. Assume you’re getting three percent; you don’t get in to parliament of three percent in most countries in Europe but that three percent could decide who’s prime minister.

So, the other parties are adopting policies at record speed to not lose votes to the Pirate Party. Now, I didn’t want to become a politician, I had a nice job in IT so, if other people are doing the work for me, I’m not going to complain about that.

With so many other issues surrounding politics, why would I give my vote to the Pirate Party? What’s being done to tackle that problem?

We figured that we’d hack the system in a proportional representation system. By only having a narrow platform we could be much more honest than the other parties. Pretending to be able to run the country on your own is frankly dishonest. After the election all the smaller parties would just drop nine out of ten policies on the floor and they wouldn’t tell voters which policies they were going to drop. Nine out of ten voters would be disappointed; their heartfelt issues would not be considered.

You should vote for us if our issues are more important than the difference between the blocks on the other issues. If freedom of speech is more important to you than the difference between 78 or 78.5 percent of unemployment benefit, you should vote for us.